Darker Minds Crime and Suspense

Beneath the Flesh, A Darker Minds Crime & Suspense Novella: Releases 5th June 2026

20th April 2026 by claireladds

YOU CAN PRE-ORDER NOW!

Image shows Beneath the Flesh novella on a tablet and on a phone screen. Text reads: Beneath the Flesh, a Darker Minds novella, Book release 5th June 2026, pre-order now.

I am delighted to say that Beneath the Flesh, the fourth book and this time a novella, in the Darker Minds series of standalone crime/psychological suspense, will release as an e-book on 5th June, 2026.

Here is the blurb for the book, to set the scene…

IF YOU INVITE A STRANGER INTO YOUR HOME, YOU’D BETTER HAVE NO SECRETS…

There’s an argument. A moan. Ella is too scared to wait and see what’s happened. But the next morning, her landlord has vanished, leaving her alone with Miriam, her cruel and abusive landlady. If Ella hadn’t run away years ago, she wouldn’t be stuck here now.

Miriam wakes. She’s not in bed; she’s on the kitchen floor, cold and confused. Then she finds a knife next to her – and it’s soaked in blood, just like her husband’s bed sheets.

When Miriam advertises for a tenant two months later, one comes knocking. While Miriam can’t wait to install new tenant, Maya, into her missing husband’s single bedroom, Ella knows there’s more to this new paying guest than she’s letting on. Because Ella knows exactly who she is. But is Maya an ally – or an enemy?

Revenge is a dish best served cold…

I have very much enjoyed converging the stories of these three women, especially Miriam. She was a lot of fun to write about!

You can pre-order Beneath the Flesh from a variety of e-book stores right now. It will be available to buy and download immediately on 5th June from Kobo, Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers and will, like all my other e-books, be available to order through your local library or library app. So if you prefer to use BorrowBox, Libby, Hoopla or other apps offered by your library, you can request Beneath the Flesh (and any of my other books, too).

PRE-ORDER BENEATH THE FLESH

Image shows four books in the Darker Minds series by Claire Ladds. the books are standing diagonally against a brick wall, in a row.

Other books in the series:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

No Deadlier Time

Beneath the Flesh is the last book I am writing in this collection. My writing is transitioning, and I will be explaining much more about this in future posts. However, I feel that it is also pertinent to mention it here. After much careful consideration, and notwithstanding the fact that I have thoroughly gained deep enjoyment from writing the Darker Minds books as well as my other standalone suspense novels, I have made the decision as a creative to return to the genre which both began my writing career and for which I have an enduring passion: literary fiction. The Secrets That Haunt Us and The Reason for Everything: and other stories, are both literary fiction books, one a novel and the other a short story collection which houses a number of my prize-winning stories. I have so many other tales to tell which do not sit neatly within genre boundaries, and this is where I intend to put my focus, going forward.

If you would like to stay connected and also experience my more literary work, as well as receive exclusive benefits, discussion about my behind-the-scenes process and other bookish topics, be among the first to see new covers, and be notified of all offers and discounts on my books wherever and whenever they happen, and much more, you can join my Readers’ Club. It is completely free, and you will also receive a welcome gift, an e-book copy of Petal by Petal: Stories of love, obsession and murder (available from May 2026).

Image shows a horizontal rose and various reading screens with a cover of Petal by Petal short story collection on them. Each one has a rose rising up out of petals scattered all over the floor on a brown and oil painting textured background.

JOIN THE READERS’ CLUB

FIND OUT MORE

What’s at the Heart of my Psychological Suspense Fiction?

15th February 2026 by claireladds

Ever since I was a small child, I have been a reader and a writer in equal measure (most of the time). Without even realising it for a long time, I would delve the depths of a book I enjoyed for whatever I felt was at its core: the reasons behind whatever was its central theme or moment. It has always been that I have wanted to get under the skin of a story, right to its very heart. The same has always applied to my writing. To make me interested, then obsessed by, a story enough to pursue it to its ending (however dark, tragic, twisty or heartfelt) there needs to be this same kind of heart, one which makes me love to be at my desk with the story, the characters, and the very words themselves. The elements of this beating heart are rarely the same for two stories running, yet they make up all the parts of writing my books that I absolutely adore. In this post, I’ll give you a run-down of several of my psychological suspense books, to show you what I mean when I say that each of my stories has a heart. And, for me at least, this heart often beats on well after typing the last sentence.

I’m going to begin with Show Me Dead, as it holds a very special place in my emotions. There was so much I fell in love with, the deeper I went into this novel. This was the first book in a brand new series linked by theme – and I had the opportunity to write as if no one was watching (which they weren’t)! I wanted a book full of Gothic-inspired atmosphere, which is why I set it almost exclusively in the catacombs of a dilapidated theatre. As I was writing, I had in mind a visual image of the entire book, scene by scene, almost as if I was watching an entire theatre performance myself (although, thankfully, I’ve never sat through performances that this one had to offer!). I imagined lights flickering, the dust in the air, the old and battered seats – and the terror on the stage. This book has been described as “claustrophobic”, and that’s exactly the atmosphere I was aiming for. Who wouldn’t want to escape from there – especially when the actors, themselves already captive, begin to go missing…?

I’ll refer to setting again later. But, as all readers know, characters are an endless source of fascination, and there are always some characters you love writing most as an author. As much as the tension and almost living dread in the walls of the setting of the catacombs of the theatre, I loved creating the characters. They felt very close, very special, to me, especially Angel, my main character, and the young girl, Pierette, who has also been held captive and terrified by the Puppet Master, for as long as she can remember. It was the vulnerability I found within them that made me care so much (and I genuinely, at times, cried for them; I can be a very emotional writer). And, ultimately, this drove me to dig deep and find what was at the heart of the strength they never knew they had. The journey from disempowerment to their own very particular kind of emancipation captivated me, and the characters of Show Me Dead continue to live on in my writer’s brain. I may even write more in their strange, terrifying world. If I do, then their emotions will play a huge part in finding the heart of the reason for the story, both theirs and mine.

Something similar happened with regard to character when I began writing That Killer Image, I knew almost instantly that I was going to love writing about Anthony, the completely obsessive photographer with only one objective: to capture what, to him, is the perfect image. Maybe, in a writerly way, I wanted to capture my own ‘perfect’ image of him as a dangerous man – more dangerous, as we discover, than anyone had realised before. But, as with all villains, he has his own motivations which, to him, make complete and logical sense, which is always what makes villains and antagonist characters so fascinating. His backstory is of immense importance here, as his present is haunted by his past, driven by the events which took place in his young life, and most importantly, how he felt and reacted emotionally and viscerally to them. There are times when he makes me feel incredibly emotional and sorry for him, yet these same incidents leave me completely terrified of this man. No surprise there – he’s a serial killer! And, the more I wrote his chapters, the more I realised he was an even darker character than even I expected him to be. That’s one of the challenges and the fun parts: the more you write about a character, the more you find out about them (even when you’re the one who invented them in the first place!).

Sometimes it is a theme combined with a sense of atmosphere which pulls me to a story, and it was the Gothic-inspired nature of everything about No Deadlier Time which held me captivated with this story from start to finish. At the heart of the book, it questions where reality ends and where fantasy born of a destructive mental state begins. It also questions something which is fundamental for me in my suspense literature: who or what is truly guilty and morally, as well as physically, culpable?

The book actually began life as a short horror story, which I weave into the book in monologue conversations my main character, Harry, has with his father. Harry blames his father for the dark past lurking in the house (and for something which happens there when he returns with his pregnant wife) which pull him into a terrible and deadly chain of events. I said I would return to setting, and in this book the house itself is at the very centre, and acts as a character in its own right, which I found fascinating. All the way through, I could picture the ancient, crumbling family home which sits on the edge of a cliff, isolated from the village full of deviants and criminals. Ravens live there and become integral to Harry’s declining mental state, infiltrating the landscape, his dreams – and the curse which the family, the house, and its grounds will not let die. There is a feeling of dark foreboding felt by the guilty and the innocent in this house – right to the terribly dark conclusion. I wonder who (or what) you would feel is the most guilty if you read this novel?

I’ll leave my Darker Minds novels now, and move onto a couple of standalone psychological suspense/thrillers. It may not come as a surprise, given what you’ve read so far, that I’ve always loved books with twists, and particularly with characters who have emotional-driven, dark and deep-rooted motivations. When I began writing Hers or Mine and delved further into the characters of paranoid and desperate wife, Lucy, and the enigmatic Charlotte, owner of a creative retreat where Lucy decides to spend time, I realised this was the kind of book I was going to write. It was clear immediately that there was so much more to these two women than met the eye. And there really is! This psychological suspense is a slow-burn by necessity. We have to get to know these characters (or at least think we know them), because each twist revolves around the characters themselves – their pasts which won’t stay buried, their actions, and in particular the deep-rooted, agonising and obsessively dark emotions which live within them and drive them to do… ah, no spoilers here!

Hers or Mine is also very much about relationships. Broken ones, betrayed ones, and ones that grow from a love tied to loyalty, gratitude and something much deeper than we could expect. So love in its many forms features heavily in this book, although there’s nothing straightforward about that, either. At its most pure, it brought tears to my eyes as the writer; at its worst it’s love which destroys people from the inside. Everything that happens to the characters in this story stems from their individual personal experiences, circumstances and feelings for someone else. It makes it as much of a psychological drama as it does a psychological suspense novel, and I truly loved writing it.

Indeed, during the two decades since my very first short story was published, I’ve been exploring the theme of love in my novels and short stories. What interests me most is the way different types of love are formed, and changed based on experience. And how sometimes it doesn’t change but becomes deeper, even darker, more obsessive and – potentially – dangerous. This danger could be to the one who holds such love in their heart, or to the object of this love. So I find it intriguing to explore the grey areas between innocence and guilt, and between heartfelt love and something that morphs into the (self-) destructive kind. I took this to the limits in my psychological suspense thriller, You Know You Shouldn’t.

Love with the darkest heart pervades this entire book from start to finish. A passionate (and, unknown to my protagonist, Eva, at the time, manipulative) relationship from the past leaves a shared history with a dark secret between her and the villain which affects the entire story. Obsessive love plays its part, too: it’s this obsession which is lethal, and which dictates the villain’s behaviour, leading Eva down a path which she realises too late that is affecting everyone she loves. Her emotions drive her, consume her, and undermine her, until she has no choice but to make (or struggle to make) some impossible decisions to try and keep her loved ones alive. Different forms of love become entangled, from the romantic to the co-dependent, to the familial, to the need to love oneself. Only this can stop a love that has gone so bad, so dangerous, that no one is safe. Such an intense, unpredictable and terrifying love was quite an experience to write.

What I hope is evident, then, is that the very heart of my psychological suspense, even the darkest ones, have at the very core feelings. My characters are very much driven by their emotions, whether, for example, because of a romantic relationship gone bad, or obsessions, desperation to get out of a situation, or loyalty and pure love. Feelings are by their very human nature, complex, and this complexity is what creates the twists and turns in the plots, as the characters themselves drive various actions due to how they feel. In a similar way, a reader’s feelings are extremely powerful, and for their own feelings to run amok as they become invested in the characters’ emotions, and in the psychological and emotional pull of settings which breathe life and darkness into a story is everything I sincerely hope for in a reading experience of one of my books. Reading itself is a feeling: one of being transported to the world of someone else and experiencing the events with them at a deep level (even if, in the case of my books, these events can get pretty dark, dangerous, and deadly). This is what I love about reading. And it’s what I ultimately love about writing,

You can find all the books listed above, and the stores where they are available for purchase, using the links below:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

No Deadlier Time

Hers or Mine

You Know You Shouldn’t

Have You Read No Deadlier Time Yet?

23rd November 2024 by claireladds Leave a Comment

The nights are dark… The cold envelops you like an embrace from Death himself, and the wind whispers its secrets through the cracks and crevices of your mind… What better time to read a dark, Gothic-inspired crime and suspense book like No Deadlier Time? The best part? No Deadlier Time is available as an e-book for 99p/99c/your country’s equivalent for the rest of November (and I might even extend that into December – call it an early Christmas present!).

BUY NO DEADLIER TIME

In case you’ve never encountered the novel before, here’s the book description:

~~~

A family with dark secrets. Will someone kill to keep them?

Neve Eldritch is pregnant, happy, and has one wish – to get her husband, Harry, to reconnect with his family. Neve has never met them – and with good reason. Now there’s a chance to move into the family home and heal a long-standing rift. Going home can’t be that bad. Can it? But something feels wrong from the moment they arrive.

When you’ve avoided the problem for so long, it’s bound to rear its ugly head. All Harry ever wanted was to be worthy in his dad’s eyes. There’s a secret to success, one his dad has taunted him with as a boy, but now he’s gone to drastic lengths to stop Harry getting hold of it. Desperate to prove himself, Harry takes matters into his own hands – with deadly results.

But Harry isn’t prepared for what the horrifying key to his family’s success really is, and it’s spiralling out of control. When murder follows murder, he’s sure he’s committed them. How can he stop himself and keep his family safe when the secret he now holds won’t let him – and he can’t remember any of it?

Suspicions run rife in Neve. Her husband is lying to her. Is he crazy? Or is he a killer? Or maybe – just maybe – someone, somewhere, wants rid of him, and they’ll do anything to get what they want. And she’s sure they’re here, at the isolated family home. Do they want to kill her, too?

Terrible choices lay ahead if anyone is to get out alive. One person can save them all. But time is ticking away… and it’s proving to be deadly.

Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.

This book is part of the Darker Minds crime and suspense thriller series: Dark minds are at work. Sometimes it takes a darker one to stop them.

~~~

There are other books in the Darker Minds series. All these books are standalone novels and can be read in any order:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

You can also get a FREE copy of Beneath the Flesh as a welcome gift when you join my Readers’ Club.

So… if you want the darkness to envelop you, and hold you close as you read a devastatingly dark tale of family secrets, impetuous murder, and deadly dreams, grab your copy of No Deadlier Time for 0.99, curl up by candlelight… and be careful what you wish for!

FIND YOUR PREFERRED STORE AND BUY HERE

Books Make Perfect Christmas Presents

25th November 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

I love Christmas shopping. Not the actual shopping – the food, and trying to figure out which socks are the right size, and did Great Aunty Helen actually already have a sandwich toaster? – because, to me, that’s an absolute nightmare. No, what I love is the atmosphere – the lights, the beautiful displays, the sound of carols and Christmas songs filterign through the air, the myriad smells of food cooking on the street stalls, the quirky gifts that you can find, especially those ones that have been lovingly created by a real human being, where you can tell that time and energy has been poured into them.

This latter is how I see books: one of the quirky gifts. The story itself has been created in the author’s head, then formed, layers added to build it into a narrative, its separate parts dovetailed then worked on until it has perfectly working joins, sanded into seamless storytelling, varnished and finally displayed in its own individual, beautiful form. How exciting is that – to be able to read the ideas that have been created in a writer’s imagination, and encapsulated in such a tangible form?! As you read this post, you’ll notice how much I value the opportunity of being able to give books at Christmas, as much as being a recipient of them.

My absolute favourite place to be at Christmastime is a bookshop. In truth, you’d be hard pushed to keep me out of them all year round, but there’s something extra cosy, extra exciting, about being there knowing I’m choosing something for a loved one to read. To me, giving a book is a more modern development of the tradition of oral storytelling. We all absorb story in many ways every day, from novels to conversations to adverts on the TV, and in many more ways, too. Instead of passing a story on to others around a fire, it’s become a physical (or digital, or audio) form that enables the recipient of the story to engage with their imagination on a deep level, and at their own pace. The book itself acts as a conduit between the author’s imagination and the reader’s innate desire for story. We need them to act as an overarching metaphor, a point of identity with a character or a situation, or with choices and consequences, to help make sense of our own lives.

As a voracious reader, I consume story in as many ways as possible. But I have to say that there is something special about holding a book in my hands, smelling the pages (yes, I do that!), leafing through the sheets and sheets that contain insights that I wouldn’t ever have been able to experience in the way that I do, had the invention of the printing press never come into existence. But, for me, the experience is magnified during the cold UK winter weather, as the rain batters on the bookshop windows and dusk becomes darkness outside. The bookshop becomes a haven, a cosy-lit home-from-home for book lovers. The place is wallpapered with bookshelves, carpeted with tables of new, bestselling and on-offer novels, and you can often sit and read the books you buy or – in some bookshops – before you do so. What I especially love is that the people around me are all there doing exactly the same as me, and chances are they’re as much of a bibliophile as I am!

I remember going into bookshops as a child, determined that I was going to:

a) buy everyone in my entire family a book to read for Christmas because I loved choosing the books, loved the secret shenanigans I got up to beforehand as I tried to discover which books in a series they’d already got and which they still needed, and because they were easy to wrap nicely(!), and

b) point out to the adult(s) with me which books I really thought were amazing, and stand looking longingly at them – surely someone would take the hint… (you can’t blame a book-obsessed girl for trying!).

What I have never forgotten, however, is the sheer wonder I experienced while taking the time to choose presents for my loved ones. My perusals which led to learning about so many more genres than I read myself at the time, elation at being surrounded by so many books in general and the shelves and shelves of Agatha Christie books in particular (my local branch of WH Smith at the time had an entire wall devoted to Christie novels), and the ultimate book-buying that connected us through a love of reading, even if that’s not what I realised I was doing at the time. A gift from one reader to another, for me, is something very special and personal. Nowadays, of course, we can choose to buy paperbacks and hardbacks, or gift e-books instead. We can even give people the opportunity of reading with their ears through audiobooks – something I wish I’d been able to offer up as presents for certain members of my family when I was a child. There really is something for everyone nowadays. And I truly think that’s wonderful.

If you are planning on buying books as Christmas presents this year, I hope you have as much fun doing it as I do. And if you open up your presents on Christmas Day and find that someone has taken the time to try and connect with your imagination through a story they think you’ll love, then you have, in my opinion, been given a gift that will keep on giving. It will give love to you every time you read it, or think about it, or when it inspires your own imagination or wish to devour more stories.

Our real lives revolve around the story we live every day. Not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to choose how that story plays out, either some or all of that time. So, at Christmastime, why not let someone you know have the enjoyment of living in their imaginations with the characters that authors have created for those who love the kinds of stories they offer up as gifts, so that we can lose ourselves in them? It might turn out to be the best gift you could ever give.

***

(It would be remiss of me – as an author – to not throw in a cheeky quick mention my own books here. If you’d like to see the ones I have on offer, you can find all my books here. Maybe you could stuff a loved one’s new reading device with e-books, or grab a paperback stocking filler for the suspense reader in your life.)

Would you like to get all my posts straight to your email inbox? You can subscribe to all my blog posts and news here:

Beneath the Flesh: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 5)

4th March 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Welcome to the fifth and final part of my mini-series, touting my love for writing prologues!

Today’s extract is quite a long one, as the prologue itself is split between the viewpoints of two main characters, from opposing backgrounds and with vastly different character traits. Prologues can, most definitely, be used to emphasise what the characters are like. I don’t think it’s easy (or necessarily helpful to the book) to use a prologue only for this purpose because the whole book itself, chapter by chapter, should be doing this anyway. But what the prologue can do is show how a character behaves and set up the reader’s expectation for the ways they might react when problems begin to be thrown at them – or, in my book’s case, probably murder…

The extract I have for you today is from Beneath the Flesh. As you’ve probably gathered, the prologue gives the reader a massive insight into the main characters of the book. It also sets up an incident (often called the inciting incident) which directly leads to everything that happens in the main story. Without it, the rest of the action, suspicions and skulduggery would have nothing to hang on. Look at this prologue at a very wordy coat hanger, if you want!

There you have it – the final part of my mini-series showing you how much I love prologues and how I use them. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the extracts. If you want to read more of my work, you’ll find details of all my books on this website and also on many e-book stores.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

P.S. The one obvious profanity is replaced with **** for the purposes of this extract.

~~~

Beneath the Flesh

TWO MONTHS AGO

The voices were muffled, hidden almost entirely away behind the thick wooden door. Except for that gap where the light seeped onto the landing.

Ella got closer, placing one foot at a time gingerly on the thin strip of well-vacuumed carpet that ran all the way down the centre of the floor. With immense care, she balanced herself against the door frame. That floorboard directly outside the bedroom doorway would be heartless in betraying her presence. Mr Cavannagh had told her he was convinced that his wife had loosened it on purpose, as her own personal warning system. Or just as a convenient excuse to be able to inflict punishment. She imagined the one-sided conversation: Well, Ella. Listening at doors. Sneaking about. That doesn’t happen at Sunny Cottage. And we know what happens if you do something that’s against my rules, don’t we? Ella agreed with Mr Cavannagh; she wished that he dared fix it.

She shook away the imagined voice and concentrated.

There was a crack of about an inch where the door hadn’t closed. Ella’s fingers gripped the dark green paintwork on the door frame. There was nothing to see, except Mr Cavannagh’s window and a wardrobe. She angled her ear to the gap. What was the argument about this time?

The male voice was subdued, struggling to give itself any proper air of authority.

‘It’s not right. Any of this. I’m tired, Miriam. I’m sick of the way I’m forced to do everything you say. Of being controlled. It’s not right.’

‘And just what exactly isn’t right?’

Ella recognised the drop in tone of her landlady’s voice. Her stomach felt like someone had begun to grind it with a cheese grater. Something was brewing, and there were going to be consequences. There always were.

Her finger ends were freezing. It was the lack of fires, and the way the cold shot through the crack in the corner of the window. Bits of snow were whipping through and landing on her back. She tried not to let the shivering that reverberated through her nightie make her arms quiver so much that her hand slipped off the frame. If it happened, then her fingers would squeak down the polished paintwork. Someone – she, Miriam – would come and investigate the sound. Then it would be worse. Everything would be worse.

The voices carried on, Mr Cavannagh trying to fend off his wife’s nasty, cruel sniping, but with little success. She wished Miriam would stop. That she would just go away. Vanish. Poor Mr Cavannagh. Ella still struggled to call him Jim, even though he’d told her to from that very first day. He’d always been lovely to her. He was a kind, gentle man. He didn’t deserve the evil that was spewing at him inside that bedroom. Her body grew hotter as the sadness and anger inside her whirred with nowhere to go.

Her thoughts were cut off as she caught more words from the other side of the door.

‘Sick of being beholden to your meal times. Bedtimes. Sick of being treated like an idiot who’s incapable of doing anything without you laying into me about it or making me out to be an imbecile in front of the lodgers.’

‘Lodger. There’s only one. And we know how much you like her, don’t we, husband of mine?’

There was a pause. The wind sighed through the crack and brought more snow in with it. The flakes landed, falling as flat as Mr Cavannagh’s words.

‘You can’t treat the girl the way you do, Miriam. It’s not right.’

Prickles rose, creeping through Ella’s back and wrapping around her neck like a too-tight scarf as a thud shook the floorboards. A chair being knocked over? Ella wasn’t sure. The female voice lost its low tone and now shifted into a serpentine hiss.

‘I can do whatever I like. This is my house and don’t you forget that. You live here because I let you.’

‘And I thought it was because you loved me.’

There was a laugh, a deadened, defeating stamp on the words that should have meant something but no longer did. Maybe they never had.

Ella clung harder to the door frame, palms sweating. She fought with herself to stand still, but the polish was making it difficult. She had to shift her feet. They were slipping on the carpet, that loose floorboard now threatening to betray her existence right outside the room. She breathed in; she wasn’t sure if she breathed out.

Her hands were fighting a losing battle with the sweat- polish combination. She clung to the green paint. A lump formed in her throat as one slimy palm began to slip down the paintwork and she had to reposition herself. Her heart was banging so hard in her ribs she expected it to snap her bones.

She pressed her fingertips against the frame so hard that they grew translucent. Goosebumps spiked in a line, up Ella’s calves and mirrored in her forearms, leaving her fingers tingling. If Miriam caught her out here now…

Her concentration slipped. So did her left hand. A wave of sickness crashed into her throat as she snatched her hand back. Too late, though. The door moved. A boulder of complete terror lodged in Ella’s throat. She waited for the wood to swing on its hinges and bang against the bedroom wall. Then Miriam would fly to the door and… she didn’t want to imagine what happened next. Ella shut her eyes, praying to anything that was listening for nothing to happen.

Weirdly, it didn’t. Ella squinted one eye open, then the other, to find the door open maybe another couple of inches further. No more than that, certainly. But she could see half of the room now.

Miriam was standing with her back towards the door. If Ella had thought she could get away with breathing a sigh of relief, she would have. But she still wasn’t sure she was breathing at all. Mr Cavannagh was nowhere she could see, except for half a bare foot, which was shunting up and down at a violent speed. She’d seen that motion many times before, but usually it was wearing a shoe or a slipper, as it fought off the spiteful sniping of his wife. Where were his slippers? Maybe Mad Miriam had confiscated them.

Ella dithered, toyed with the idea of moving. Leaving the door. Creeping back to bed and not coming out of her room any more that night, or any other night. But something stopped her doing it. It always did. Some tiny, inner rebel that had been buried for years. It came out when she knew she didn’t have to face a conscious Miriam, usually, only a zombified one. She cursed inwardly that this tiny rebel creature that lived inside her refused to take her to safety while Miriam was on the rampage the other side of the door, and instead left her rooted to the spot.

Mr Cavannagh’s voice came from somewhere behind the door, as the bed creaked, and the foot moved out of sight.

‘I can’t…’

Ella winced as he was interrupted by the biting words of his wife.

‘Can’t what, you sad little man?’

‘I can’t let you treat the girl like you do. You know she’s got nowhere else to go.’

Ella’s eyes stung. Miriam didn’t let up.

‘Then she should work harder in the shop, shouldn’t she? Like you do, darling husband.’

‘I’m going to help her find somewhere. A place she can afford. Away from you. There must be somewhere.’

Ella’s chest banged. Mr Cavannagh’s intentions were well meant, but his attempt would come to nothing. She knew that. She buried the knowledge that, if it did, she would be leaving him behind to the tirade of verbal abuse that began again now.

‘And what are you going to do? Declare your repulsive, endless love for her and tell her you’ll look after her until your dying day? Well, that’s coming sooner than you’d like to think, you lecherous old man. Are you going to hole her up in some filthy little flat and tell her that bad Miriam won’t hurt her anymore? You’re pathetic. Pathetic and incapable – in every way.’

If Ella had the courage, she’d have confronted that woman, grabbed her by her hair and smashed her face into the wall.

‘She’s just a kid. Leave her alone.’
Ella detected elements of defiance in Mr Cavannagh’s tone. Anger, even. But not enough. Her heart sank, as if in quicksand. There was never enough. Poor Mr Cavannagh.

‘She’s not a child. She’s twenty-three. Seven years of being here and you know she’s no child, don’t you?’ Insinuation dripped from Miriam’s words. Ella fumed inside. What she was suggesting wasn’t even close to being true. Miriam continued, jibing at her husband. ‘You know. She’s old enough to rent my room with her wages, except she doesn’t, does she? She lives here rent-free because of you. And to expect me to cook her evening meal. And so she can expect to abide by my rules, like other tenants before her.’

‘And look what happened to them. What you did to them.’ There was an audible sigh. ‘You take all her wages off her anyway. What’s she supposed to pay with? Fresh air? It’s bad enough that you’ve stuck her in that bloody shop of yours. Seven years. Ella, you poor kid.’

The floorboards inside the room creaked. Ella’s legs stiffened. They were like ice inside, sweat breaking out on her skin and feeling like it was turning to ice, too. She fought an almost uncontrollable shiver.

Miriam’s voice sank low again. Her words drawled. Ella could picture Mr Cavannagh’s face, red and blotchy, waiting for the backlash. It came.

‘And now, before I go and make my cocoa and take it to my bed, I think you need reminding that you’ve been ungrateful, and that you’ve broken the house rules. Bed by ten applies to everyone. It’s half past. If you think I wouldn’t find this…’

There was a jingle. It sounded like a key. Couldn’t the poor man even smoke his pipe outside at night? Ella had seen him from the window. He’d looked up and smiled at her, then put one vertical finger to his lips as he’d wrapped one arm around the coat which covered his pyjamas. She would never have said anything. They had an understanding. And the snow would cover his footprints in seconds.

But nothing covered the fear in his voice.
‘I’m not going to let you. No, Miriam…’
There was a silence. Ella froze to the spot, her fingers gripping the door frame so hard that the tips were completely numb. She couldn’t see either of them now, and bile stung her throat.

‘I’m going to… There are people I can tell, you know. Or I could just… leave…’ Mr Cavannagh’s voice tailed away.

Ella flinched at the sound that followed. Like the noise she imagined might emanate from a squealing pig if you stuffed it in a duvet.

Silence flooded the air, hanging there, waiting. The wind snaked cold around her shoulders and snow flicked in and disappeared into the carpet.

Then, finally, there was just one word, uttered by the lady of the house.

‘Pathetic.’

Ella tried not to gulp air or gag on her own spit as she inched her feet backwards. As soon as she was on firm, silent carpet, she shot back along the landing. Her hands shook as she closed her bedroom door. This once, she was thankful for Miriam’s obsession with oiling hinges and polishing door catches.

Ella didn’t move. Not at all. She wasn’t sure how many minutes passed before the bedroom door opened, just enough to leave a silhouetted figure standing, hand on hip, fingers flexing on the door handle. Ella knew that was what she would see if she was stupid enough to open her eyes.

She kept them closed.

***

Miriam

A grunt fell from Miriam’s half-open mouth as consciousness began to infiltrate her. Her brain grew less fuzzy until she recognised there was silence, apart from the slow, constant dripping of a tap. It took a split second for that to irritate her.

She listened for the ringing. But there was none. That wasn’t right. That meant she wasn’t in control of the time she woke up and something else had done it when she hadn’t wanted it to. Her irritation bubbled away as she laid there. Why hadn’t the alarm clock done its job? It should have woken her at the exact time she set. What was the point in relying on anything to do a job properly?

Her feet hurt: two painful, freezing blocks on the end of her ankles. So cold she might have been outside in the ice house. Or what had once been the ice house. Dilapidated mess that Jim should have fixed but hadn’t. The bubbling annoyance switched to anger, forcing her to open her eyes.

No, she was sure she was inside. She was in bed because it wasn’t time to get up yet. Her side hurt. It was cold, too, and there was a dull pain throbbing through her ribs. Her tongue stuck to the back of her mouth as she tried to swallow and pull herself upright but failed. It wasn’t the bed that was underneath her. She felt around. Whatever was there was hard, solid. And her hand touched on something else, too. Thin, long. She flinched as it clattered towards her head and narrowly missed her.

She blinked a few times. Why was it so dark? And why was she so cold, and in pain? She grasped onto all her senses as realisation hit her with its mallet in her chest. It had happened again, hadn’t it?

In the bit of insipid, shadowy light that reflected off the snow outside, she recognised that the object which had nearly smacked her on the head was the handle of the mop. What the hell…?

Apart from that bit of snow-induced glimmer, there was still dark outside, as she finally let it dawn on her that the room that she was in was the kitchen. Or, more accurately, that she was spreadeagled on the step which dropped down from the kitchen into the old wash house. No wonder she was freezing. The floor was made of the original Georgian encaustic stone tiles.

Something was digging into her side; that was what was causing the pain. The edge of the step, presumably. Her palm jabbed around beneath her and touched something. It was cold, but not as much as the floor. And it had a rounded edge. Her hand grasped it and she pulled it out from under her.

She forced her body upright and flicked on a light. She stared at her hand, gripping the handle of the object tightly in her palm. Pointing away from her, about eight inches long, was a thick blade. It was caked in blood. Her head struggled to comprehend what her eyes were seeing. The blood had dried on the metal and caught the dim artificial light as brown streaks and globules made of purple rust.

Her eyes cast down at herself. At the blood. Was she bleeding? It was smeared all over one side of the pure white cotton. She lifted her nightie and ascertained that she wasn’t. Only – that pain in her side really hurt.

Her head began to spin. She let the knife clatter to the floor as she caught her reflection in the window, against the blackness outside. That, and the incessant mesh of snow that was falling. There was so much snow out there you could get lost in it and no one would know you were there. The weather forecaster had said that it was going to go on for weeks yet. In the window, it looked like it was trying to erase her, bombarding her with an endless stream of white, mocking the blood stain that had leeched into her nightie.

She snapped her gaze away and shuddered. The motion of it was making her feel quite sick. The light off would be better. She stood there, on the icy stone floor, in the dark once more. Her bones were aching from her feet upwards, but it made her brain refocus. She had to think: if she was here now, she must have been somewhere else before she ended up in the kitchen.

She rummaged in her memories, trying to find what she could of the previous night. That little cow had scuttled off to bed at the mention of half rations for breakfast if she even contemplated helping herself to any of the leftovers. Greedy little swine. Then there had been the row with Jim. Useless specimen. At least she didn’t have to justify him as a disappointment to the generations of her family who were buried in the graveyard. Why did he have to be so pathetic?

That word – ‘pathetic’ – triggered something. She’d hit Jim with – oh, who knows what it was this time? He was talking like he was going to leave. Leave, and take that sad, pretty, young little…

Her tongue didn’t seem to want to allow her to swallow. As silently as she always did when she was awake, she crept up the stairs and towards Jim’s bedroom. She paused by the door of that sneaky little creature. No movement from her. That was good.

Jim’s door was already ajar. She held in a sigh of relief. He must be dressed, then. That was something, at least. Anything was better than having to look at that revolting black toe nail on his right foot. She kept waiting for the big toe to drop off. If it did, it wouldn’t make him any more useless around the place than he already was.

Without bothering to knock, she walked in. The room was empty. His bed was empty. A snapshot pummelled her brain, all of it taking no more than a second – her arm swinging, Jim making some stupid sound. Then she’d left. She’d definitely left the room. And that little cow was asleep, she’d doubly checked that. And then she’d woken on the step between the kitchen and the wash house. Instinctively, she rubbed the spot where the pain was slicing into her.

So why was there blood all over Jim’s bed sheets?

She ripped them off. It had soaked through into the mattress. She just stared at the dirty patch that was turning brown and had seeped into the fibres of the fabric. A waxy sweat broke out of every pore on her body and she smelled strange. If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought she was going to be sick. But she was never sick. She never lost control of herself like that.

Miriam grabbed and tugged at the mattress, grunting as she twisted it up onto its side, then let it fall back into place on its reverse side. That was better. The mess was invisible now. Gone.

She swallowed hard. Picked up the bundle of sheets. Took them into her own room. Without a sound, without even a thought going through her head, she went through the motions of undressing, putting on day clothes, picking up the sheets once more, and silently padding on the carpet where she knew the floorboards didn’t creak, returning to the kitchen.

She put down the pile of bedding very carefully, right next to where the knife lay. She stood there, looking at it – she wasn’t sure how long for. A spurt of instinctive energy in her arm made it grab the knife and thrust it in among the pile of sheets. She took a few quick steps back and heaved a harsh sigh. That was better. She couldn’t see it anymore. If she just looked out the window, towards the snow, everything would be fine.

But the snow made her feel dizzy. She held her jaw firm and boiled the kettle. Made a coffee. Just as she was about to pick up the cup, her peripheral vision caught sight of the sheets, leaving her skin pricking all over. She rearranged the bedding, so all she could see were the parts that still looked like pure white cotton. She nodded and gave a little grunt as she considered it, aesthetically. Then she grabbed the bottle of Jim’s whiskey out of cupboard, sneered at it, and poured away half her coffee. When she next tasted her drink, there was more alcohol than caffeine. She shuddered as it hit the back of her mouth.

Miriam tried to hold her coffee without shaking the contents over the draining board. She argued with her conscience, sometimes silently, sometimes aloud, the gist of it being that it should get a grip on itself. It seemed to work, although every so often her entire body shook. She clutched the cup and swigged back the liquid.

‘Mrs Cavannagh?’

What the hell was that? Miriam spun round, the remaining contents of the cup spattering itself in an arc across her clean clothes.

‘**** hell.’ She glared at the pathetic creature who stood there in the doorway. Her chest hammered and her heart rate began on some kind of horrific ‘fast forward’ race to leave her breathless. She knew she had to recover herself. Behave normally. It should have been easy. For Miriam, this had always been easy before. Why the hell couldn’t she calm herself fast enough for the girl to be too dense to notice?

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…’ The stupid creature was stuttering an apology now. It was sickening. Miriam glowered at her, hatred jabbing behind her eyes.

‘What are you doing up so early? Did you think you’d help yourself to extra food before I got down here, is that it? I told you yesterday…’

The sneaky little cat was withering. Simpering. It might work on Jim but it didn’t work on her.

‘No, not at all. I’m sorry. I just… I don’t know. I thought I heard a noise. I thought you were talking to…’

Miriam told her feet to move. She managed to drag them to a spot in front of the pile of sheets where that knife was balancing in the middle. She wanted to look round and check that the blood wasn’t seeping through her pristine cotton and displaying itself to the girl, but she needed to stay focused. Take control. The pain in her side hurt. She resisted holding onto it as she planted her solid five feet, three inches in front the girl.

The little cow was standing there. Just standing there. Why was she watching? Did the sneaky little creature stay awake and watch her walking around in the dead of night without any knowledge that she was doing it, or where she went? Or what she did? Could the girl tell her?

No, that was stupid, and Miriam was anything but that. She came from a family of intelligence, dignity. She must make sure that there was nothing to tell. That there was no way of telling anything. Is that what she’d done upstairs? She couldn’t remember. She didn’t remember getting the knife. She’d left Jim and gone to her own bed. Then she’d fallen asleep. And then… what? Why did this keep happening?

‘It’s not half past seven yet. If you continue to come downstairs before breakfast time, before I’m ready to serve, I might be forced to put a lock on your door at night. And take your light bulb away. How would it feel, being locked in, in the dark, and only I have the key to release you?’

That got rid of the girl. In her twenties and incapable of many things. She couldn’t stand up for herself. She did whatever she was told to avoid punishment.

Miriam shot a quick glance at the bedding. She grabbed the knife and thrust it into the sink. As she ran the tap, the thick, crusted dirty red began to fall away under the warm water, in clumps at first, then in an insipid pink stream, until only metal shone back at her. Now what?

The kitchen was old. Parts of it had stopped working over the years, much to her disgust, especially as there was no spare money to mend it. But for once she was thankful, as she opened the drawer which housed the cutlery. If she slid the knife through from this drawer to the next, it would drop – there, like that. Into the disused drawer. Miriam pulled at the handle. It was stuck. It had been stuck for well over a decade.

She couldn’t see the knife. No one could see it. It was gone. It didn’t exist. Now all she had to do was get something on those stains before she put the sheets in a boil wash. Then everything would be fine.

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[post edit:] Beneath the Flesh is available as an e-book from July 2026 from many e-book stores, through Bookshop.org and also through your library or library app.

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Show Me Dead: Read an Extract (Do You Love Prologues?, Part 4)

25th February 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Welcome to Part 4 of my mini-series on my love for prologues, and where I’m giving you a bit of an insight into how I use them, and what they do to add that bit extra to the reading experience.

There’s a couple of things I’ve not yet mentioned in this mini-series about prologues and the functions they can serve. For me, certainly in today’s extract, these two functions go hand-in-hand. One is the way they can set the tone of the book. The extract in this post is from Show Me Dead, a suspense thriller which adopts elements of the Gothic to set its tone, and certainly also skirts the borders of horror. You’ll see that I use physical darkness in the prologue to allow the main character’s imagination and memory to run amok and reveal some of her darkest secrets, right from the beginning. The book itself allows her to explain why over the course of the story.

The other function this particular prologue serves is more of a narrative, structural device. I don’t want to say anything about the story itself in too much detail here, because I don’t want to spoil the book if you’ve not yet read it, but the device I’m talking about here is the cyclic structure. This involves beginning a book in a particular place (either physically or psychologically) and developing the story in such a way that, by the end, the structure of the story has returned to the place it started – but with massive changes. It really hits home to the reader, then, how the character has changed as a consequence of the events in the book. The prologue used this way portrays something one way in order for it to be clear that this specific ‘something’ is very different by the end of the book, or has been adapted to create a hugely different feel to the tone, or possibly even an extension of, or a complete twist on, the prologue.

As we are less than a month away from International Women’s Day as I write this, I felt it appropriate to include Angel, a character I grew to love and respect, and admire more than I can say. I traced her story through some of the most horrendous incidents imaginable. Of all my female characters so far, she stands apart as determined, resilient, and an example of strength – if a somewhat dark one (I have tears in my eyes while I’m writing this. You can tell how strongly I feel about my characters, and Angel in particular). If you have already met the character of Angel, I hope you love her. If you haven’t, then I hope she intrigues you.

Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.

Happy reading!

Claire

~~~

Prologue

A voice grows out of the darkness. It breathes against my face and whispers in my ear. They say that he’s the Puppet Master and we exist to be his puppets. Everyone knows it, everyone: the audience who can’t get enough of it, the Master himself who lives and breathes it, and we – we who can’t escape it. You’re one of us now. And you know it, too.

The walls are silent. Maybe there’s only me here, and the voice is just my mind wishing, hoping for someone I can confide in, but instead it taunts me with its honesty. I don’t know. It must be the case; the others here are voiceless through training and terror. It’s safe in this place. Underground. The only place that’s safe. That’s what he tells them. They believe him.

Sometimes one of them disappears. No one can manage to voice the question and ask where they’ve gone. I know what they’re all thinking and the shame of that secret thought stops them daring to talk, in case it slips out of their mind and into the darkness. But just like them, I’m glad it wasn’t my turn – and I hope it won’t be me next.

My ears prick at the click, click that echo on the stone, somewhere beyond the heavy black door. The sound moves steadily, taunting my escalating heartbeat and my sticky palms. It gets closer; stops. The heavy grind of the key; the scrape of the ancient bolt. Then a glimmer of wavering flame as the door creaks open. The flame grows bigger, casts both light and shadow onto one side of the face which looms at mine and tilts while it considers me, then breathes into my hair. The breath becomes a whisper.

‘Who am I?’

I fight the words in my throat but I have no choice except to reply.

‘You’re the Master.’

The flame illuminates me only, in a spotlight of fire. His face falls away into the darkness, his whisper tainted by a growl.

‘What am I?’

My blood runs cold. A shiver, like an eel, squirms up my back and wraps itself around my neck. Something runs over my foot and scuttles away.

‘You’re the one who will make my nightmares come true.’

Sometimes I wake in the chair behind the desk that was once his, curled like a blood-soaked foetus. My red dress tangles all around me. The fabric sticks to my skin and beads of sweat drip down my neck, onto my chest, and glimmer orange in the torchlit flames. The memory of his breath, like the air of pure evil, lingers around my hair.

And then my brain reminds me who I am now, and tells me that the dream belongs to the past, when fear was the only thing that kept me alive. But in those dark moments when my eyelids close, I live all of it again. It’s a weakness I’ll never reveal to anyone.

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